“The situation in Iraq is extremely dangerous and atrocities happen systematically to LGBT’s,” said COC president Vera Bergkamp. “The protection to LGBT asylum seekers from Iraq which the Netherlands currently provides is totally inadequate. We ask Minister Leers to grant them asylum collectively.”

LGBT asylum seekers, if they want to avoid being deported, must still prove that they are personally at risk in their countries of origin. For Iran there is an exception. LGBT asylum seekers from that country need only to show that they are homosexual.

What then, is the difference between Iran and Iraq? Not that human rights in general, and LGBT rights in particular, are better in Iraq than in Iran. They are definitely not. However, NATO governments like in the USA, Britain, and the Netherlands now have a conflict with their Iranian counterparts about oil etc. While, on the contrary, Iraq, ever since George W. Bush invaded in 2003, over a million people were killed, over four million people became refugees, and Royal Dutch Shell got Iraqi oil contracts, is supposedly a ‘new’ Iraq, a human rights paradise. Never mind the horrible reality.

The COC estimates that there are five to fifteen LGBT asylum seekers in the Netherlands now who are at risk of being sent back to Iraq.

The COC view got approval from Human Rights Watch (HRW). On Thursday, they sent an urgent letter to Minister Leers. According to HRW special militias are active in Iraq which hunt LGBT’s. Just in February already forty homosexuals in Iraq were killed, says HRW.

HRW reported in 2009 that death squads hunted LGBT’s. It is estimated that since 2003 some 750 homosexuals were killed in Iraq. Death-rolls with the names of homosexuals hang on walls in Iraqi neighbourhoods, according to HRW.

The situation facing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Iraq is so serious that they do now qualify for asylum in the Netherlands, immigration minister Gerd Leers said on Thursday.

However, would-be refugees will have to prove they are from Iraq, the minister said in a briefing.

His decision follows the publication of a foreign affairs ministry report which was highly critical of the treatment of homosexuals in Iraq and said in some areas they are deliberately targeted by armed militias.